When you are Hanks or Will Smith, you are the powerful engine in an expensive machine. Everyone around you wants to keep you tuned, ready, and on the track, because you usually win. There is no shortage of people poised to buy what you and your team create. Everyone else, however, is just another merchant in an unimaginably competitive market. In the beginning of my film career, my desire to make the most of whatever role I was given was my sole focus. The business side of the movies was unfamiliar to me, and I never had a serious thought about writing, directing, or producing, where many actors eventually focus their energies. I felt the job was to act, to improve at that and to grow. Anything else seemed like a distraction.
For those who find that acting simply isn’t enough, the technical components of filmmaking are limitless and alluring. And the camera is king. On sets, over the years, some of the most brilliant cinematographers in history would nod at me and wave me over to the camera to look through the lens at their composition. Like when you’re invited into the cockpit by the pilot, you rarely, if ever, say no. But none of this proximity to the “film school” side of the business sparked any interest in me. Talk of lenses and cutting points and which side of the room the camera must be on went in one ear and out the other. Often, the camera team informed me of some technical adjustment or realignment they wanted to make, and I’d joke that I was in the “Acting Division,” while they were the “Science Division.” On the set of It’s Complicated, the great John Toll might turn to me and say, “The shot works better from over here.” Or, “We need to change lenses because I think it looks better on a forty.” I’d wink at him and say, “So long as you know.” By this, I meant to indicate that the technical side had little or no effect on what I was about to do. My awareness of the camera and my relationship to it were my own obligation. Like nearly all good film actors I have worked with, over time I developed an innate, acute sense of how to adjust for the camera. The job was to act with others in a scene, but also, to the best of my ability, factor in the camera and, thus, the audience itself. The camera is the proscenium, and I always feel compelled to triangulate my performance with it and the other actors. Wherever the camera is, I’ll unconsciously adjust to it.
There are not many directors who shoot films allowing for actors to simply “behave” in front of a camera in a realistic way, like Cassavetes or many of the great Europeans, and even Spielberg in films like Saving Private Ryan. Certainly those directors frame their shots deliberately, but inside of those frames, there is a latitude that is rare to find in conventional moviemaking. The normal order of business is for the actor and director to create the scene inside of an “invisible cage” imposed by the limitations of the camera, lighting, sets, and the script itself. Before you roll the camera, an Arthur Murray–esque pattern of preapproved moves is designed to lead you from one prearranged mark to the next. Once that staging is agreed upon, you are usually asked to re-create it, over and over again, varying only your intent, intonation, pace, and physicality.
As I became more experienced, the expectation was that I would bring more variety to the individual takes. If I asked the director if I could try something, the answer was usually yes, giving me more freedom to contribute ideas about scripts and character. A scene can be shot in a week or a day or an hour. Therefore, due to the normal limitations of time, my mind was often on simply manipulating the lines. I’d think, “How smart is the character? Is he a good talker, like Bill Clinton or No?l Coward, with the words at his fingertips? Or must he dig for the language to express himself, halting along the way? Is he passionate or private? Or both?”
I had to develop some relatively quick, handy ways to build a character, assuming that most directors would offer me little—and that the shooting would often be rushed. I saw early on that the production rarely rushed the cameramen’s work. Directors and cinematographers are engaged in a marriage. Shooting a film is an enormous jigsaw puzzle that director and cinematographer are primarily charged with figuring out. In this process, the actors are like midwives of creativity. Thus, the technicians want to get the performances over with as quickly as possible. In many of my films, acting would eventually become about delivering lines smartly and with as little fuss as possible.
In the 1980s, I met Sol Yurick through my friend Ronnie Dobson. Yurick, a wiry, rabbinical man, had written the great novel The Warriors in 1965, which Walter Hill had made into a wonderful film in 1979. Yurick also wrote the novel Richard A and the unusual short story “The King of Malaputa.” In 1996, my company acquired the rights to Yurick’s 1966 novel Fertig, and adapted it into a film starring Ben Kingsley, Amy Irving, and me. My friend David Black wrote the script for the film, whose title was changed to The Confession, and won the Writers Guild Award for best adapted screenplay the following year. The film tells the story of a man, Harry Fertig (played by Kingsley), who believes that certain hospital staff and administrators are directly responsible for the death of his young son through negligence. In what he sees as a biblical act of revenge, Fertig murders these staff members. He is represented by a conflicted lawyer named Roy Bleakie (played by me), and at trial he insists on pleading guilty and serving out whatever sentence befalls him in memory of his son.
This was the first film I produced, and I found it a difficult undertaking. Securing a budget, a director, a decent crew, the right cast, and appropriate New York locations was a job that ultimately distracted from my work on-screen. Add to that the fact that my part just wasn’t written as well as Ben’s role. Bleakie’s conflicts and inner turmoil didn’t come through as clearly as I had imagined, or maybe I just wasn’t very good. I began to believe that I didn’t have the ability to do both jobs. I certainly lacked the desire. I am continually amazed by and have the deepest amount of respect for someone like Warren Beatty, who has developed great scripts with top writers, then directed those films while starring in them alongside some of the world’s greatest actors. For his efforts on Reds, he won an Oscar for best director and was nominated for best picture and best actor. You must have abundant talent and drive to do that. Beatty once told me, “Until you take ultimate responsibility for all of it, you’re going to end up frustrated.” But I lacked the patience to emulate him in that regard. I wanted the right producing partner who could speak for me in all things and protect me so I could just act. But the best producers in the movie business want to work with the actors who bring with them the resources necessary to improve their odds.